Mozilla prepares second Firefox 4 beta launch

The second beta of Firefox 4 is tentatively set to land tomorrow and ahead of that Mozilla has been asking testers to offer feedback about the open source outfit’s latest browser. On Monday Mozilla ran some tests for the Firefox 4 beta 2 code freeze. It found four low-risk bugs still present in the build, but none of those …

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried the fist one

It's was way slower than Opera, and seemed to crash alot, so I uninstalled it. Same old bloated and insecure Firefox crap.

[James Hughes 1]

So...

you tested the pre-release prototype. And made your assessment on that?

[Anonymous Coward]

The clue was in the name

@AC - It was a beta, and the first beta at that. They're works in progress and not as fast and stable as the finished products are likely to be.

[Dan 55]

It'll speed up

Once the new JavaScript engine is plugged in, in about a month's time.

[Willy Messerschmitt]

URL To Final Firefox Version

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/de/landing_win.html?hl=de

It got much faster and is way more secure !

[A handle is required]

Must be mistaken...

because I don't recall Firefox being a data-octopus...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds more like

an Alpha to me

[AlexV]

Firefox lives by its extensions

I've been running 4.0 beta as my main browser since it came out, and haven't noticed any crashes or major bugs.

I don't know about synthetic benchmarks, but browsing with AdBlock and NoScript is noticeably faster than browsing in Chrome or Opera, which don't have equivalent functionality.

No, they really don't - unless scripts can be allowed or blocked on a per-domain basis within the same page (so you can could to allow theregister.co.uk, but disallow googleadservices.com and quantserve.com), and without script surrogate functionality, you're stuck with a binary choice of either allowing or disallowing script for a site. So unless you can disallow all script for the entire site (not usually very nice), you gain no performance benefit.

The AdBlock 'substitutes' I've seen don't have anything approaching the filter list subscription and easy element selection for blocking functionality, some don't collapse the blocked elements (so even if the ad isn't present, you still get a big blank spot intruding), some download the ad even if not displayed (negating performance benefits) and so on.

Bare Firefox without extensions may be arguably not as good as bare Chrome or Opera - I personally still prefer using it, but would concede that other browsers have advantages too. With extensions in the mix, though, nothing can touch Firefox.

[Andrew Norton]

equivilent funcioinality?

"I don't know about synthetic benchmarks, but browsing with AdBlock and NoScript is noticeably faster than browsing in Chrome or Opera, which don't have equivalent functionality.

No, they really don't - unless scripts can be allowed or blocked on a per-domain basis within the same page (so you can could to allow theregister.co.uk, but disallow googleadservices.com and quantserve.com), and without script surrogate functionality, you're stuck with a binary choice of either allowing or disallowing script for a site. "

So you mean unless it works the way it does?

go to site, right click, Site Preferences. you can block by domain. Actually, you've been able to block by domain for years, since about 2003 at least.

It's clear you've never even looked closely. just repeating marketing rubbish. There's a reason Mozilla spends Millions on advertising, it's to get people to believe their crap.

Oh, and you know what else the adblock substitutes don't have? lists that contain things that aren't supposed to be there, but are part of a personal agenda - you know, like Adblock did a few months back...

[AlexV]

Block by domain?

I'm looking as closely as I can, but I still don't see it. Assuming you are talking about Opera, I look under Site Preferences, but can still only see the option to turn JavaScript on or off for the whole site. This is not equivalent functionality. Better than nothing, agreed, but not good enough, for the reasons already given.

If what I posted was repeated marketing rubbish, then please do point me at a source from Mozilla saying the same thing. It's possible, I suppose, but I haven't seen it myself. My post was based on personal experience.

There are multiple filter list subscriptions available for AdBlock, if you could be more specific about the incident you're referring to, I'd like to read up on it - if a specific list is untrustworthy, please do tell.

[kit]

The best firefox release so far

I experienced little glitches when it was first installed, a couple of crashes. Since then, it works smoothly and reliably on all 3 of my windows OS (win2000, xp and win7) with no crash at all. My experience of Firefox 4, it is speedier and much more reliable at least when it is running Flash player comparing with Firefox 3 and before.

[shawnfromnh]

I tried it

I tried it an can't figure out why they put the tabs way up in the middle of the everything instead of right above the page which is the natural place to put them.

I think I'll stick with the last version of 3 till they either move them back to where they were in 3.x or till I find a replacement that has them right above the window. Can't figure out why they decided to change it, if it isn't broke don't fix it.

[The Beer Monster]

Simple fix

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